The "Real Thing"

Easter has been and gone.. an early Easter is an interesting one. What will the weather be like? will it be busy with customers and we won't be able to cope? Or will it be too quiet for the number of staff and the preparations we've done? And just how many customers will ask "You got any Lager mate?" or "Just a bitter shandy, please" or "What bitters do you have??"

Now there is the adage that states "The customer is always right", well maybe, but how do you explain to a customer that the quality imported Pilsner is not a standard "Lager" or that we don't have the normal chemical lemonade to put in a standard bitter to make a "bitter shandy" and nor do the cask conditioned ales that we dispense deserve the generic term of bitter?

The one thing that bank holidays do is bring out an extraordinary number of people who seem to think that all pubs should do the same thing......

.....and we don't.

We had a very nice band play on Easter Saturday. Well to call them a band is perhaps a little grand. I always think a band consists of at least 3 people. But, if you consider that a band could also be classed as a group of musicians producing a full musical sound then they definitely qualify.

After setting up and sound checking the lack of background music was commented on by the duo. "We only do things that are real here, real ale, real food and definitely only real music.." That got some agreement..

They are called Blackheart and are really good. See for yourself, Hopefully we'll get them back soon....sorry about the overall quality of the recording, but then we don't have the same equipment as the BBC..

Just exceptional views

We had three nice gentlemen stay at the weekend. They took some exceptional pictures of upper Eskdale. They very kindly let us have copies so we show a few here.

Credits withheld so as not to embarrass photographers - however guys, mail us if you want your names in lights.

No jam tommorrow

We have, for the last year, been serving jams and marmalade made by a nice couple from St Bees. Skip and Jonni have been making conserves for around 14 years. We had met them several times at shows and liked what they did but never actually bought much. They then stayed with us for over a week last year.

We were so impressed with them and their attitude that we felt we had to buy their jams and marmalade. Jonni's ginger marmalade is especially good and has been very popular with residents. It has been nice to have their products on our breakfast table and always a joy to visit their little house in St Bees to empty their shelves of goodies.

It is with great sadness we must mark the passing of Skip after a very long and interesting life. But it is such a great joy to have known such an interesting person and to know that he lived his life to the full.

As Kipling, I believe wrote:

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"

This means we will have to find a preserve maker who makes jams and marmalade to the high degree of authenticity as Jonni and Skip. The quality is probably hard to match at the price they achieved from a very modest kitchen and they definitely and defiantly helped us in our quest to avoid all those big brand products.

Spring is on the way - the Daffodils (more poetry?) and Crocuses are coming out. But it's still putting down snow on the tops sometimes (see pic above). But no, the main road out of here is almost never impassable due to snow. In fact it's harder to get up and down the valley during August....

More big brand kicking

The last post was about kicking out big brand lager. In the last 2 weeks we've also had fun with a major big brand cola manufacturer. We have a fridge belonging to them. We used to have a soda gun (post mix) machine but they refused to service it due to us being on fell water. The acid in the peat rots the machine, apparently. Anyway, the sales rep came and said if we don't have 80% their products in their fridge they would take the fridge away. We said if they took the fridge away we'd stock none of their products.

So, we now stock none of their products and bought a new fridge.....and the peat helps make great ale.

We have now decided to stock Fentimans soft drinks. This does make it interesting for those who require shandy, but as we don't approve of putting lemonade in good beer we are not going to loose any sleep over that. Fentimans lemonade is good traditional cloudy stuff, actually tasting of lemons. But it also makes the shandy cloudy. Interesting... better to have the lemonade to quench ones thirst and then enjoy one half of a quality beer afterwards.

A local paper featured us this week, commenting on our determination not to stock big brand products. Check out http://www.nwemail.co.uk/unknown/viewarticle.aspx?id=800821

Finally, thanks to the anonymous comment - Dave is delighted to be called nuts - but then we all knew he was anyway. To understand that you'll just have to check the previous post.